XXI. Les oiseaux de passage [pendant les grands froids]

 XXI. Les oiseaux de passage [pendant les grands froids]

He had watched her leave the ways at Blohm and Voss's, and afterwards made a quite happy water-colour of the graceful ship, done with a good deal of attention to detail, and a loving and not unskillful treatment of the glassy green, rolling waves.

—H.T. Lowe-Porter's 1927, 1955 translation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924)

Piecework did it. It's like instead of a forest with enormous trees, you have to think of small plants with shallow roots. […] Arkin once said that she was a first-class device as long as someone aimed her in the right direction. –Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969, 1970)

Margotte; provoked to rejoinder that only male quail shrill, was for Uncle Sammler, whose strides

On an occasion from a walkup on Great Russell Street, that day, remarkable for the Freudian British Museum Isis-Tyche of Cyprus (2 C.E.)—

Ruddered and with bi-horns of plenty, the object which in an ellipsis in over 45 years’s time; a namesake acronym returns shattering their gallery vitrines—His intolerance for women branded a Hummel shepherdess, whose former helmet of blonde brazens to dark caramel, airborne Roissy to Cointrin penning her love letter to Arkin—His fountain pen’s floating apostrophe between the open and closed window panels

Exploded in the lining of her breast pocket, after kilometers of writing its cartridge at last, to land—On her, within overhanging eaves of Grisons, with its successive Parker Pen, The Jotter (1954); its tungsten

Carbide capillary ball arrow clasped into the outer blazer, over his camel pardessus—The former Caroline’s as well, a carmine bespoke American Beauty (1965), in the first class of aisles of amiss and mistaken from the saved clipping of the Boeing 707 prototype Tex Johnston barrel-rolled over Lake Washington (7 August 1955)—The trip was Shula’s entry for The New York Times Magazine travel sweepstakes, and the drawings exceeding probabilities, as much the excelsior of the Dutchess county sofa with stashed currency, with intimates—

What she brought with the winner’s reservations bundled with her pre-war passport, a cloth-cover of Kuznetsov’s  Yusnost (1966), Babi Yar released in an uncensored edition’s document in the form of a novel (1970), is the MoMA exhibition press kit from Ilya’s daughter’s penthouse, out from under a mountain of catalogs, of Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1963)—

Through its gold foil, Diary of a Century, greening (1970), enclosed so many wheels of aviators and cyclists, yet first thoughts were of turbine entrances of dams—Margotte; inattentive to Dr. Lal’s plans for the milliard cubic meters (mem) of the solid state lunar watershed of comet impact water through manmade inclines for future stocked fish invulnerable to cosmic rays—Simply sifting scenarios for the skirt whorls, hatbands of Lartigue’s

Models is naïve countering Richard Avedon’s lens—Rossellini’s production of the Cocteau screenplay, Il miracolo (1948), without sound, is mastering the ecstasy before Fellini as a goatherd, or Joseph, Nannina, reaches for an apple, in whose abstention becomes Magritte’s Le fils de l'homme (1964)—Wide strides

In the orchard, the holographic way of Rémy de Gourmont (1858-1915), Simone, écarte les guêpes (1901), and stridulations from being gratified—Not E.E. Cummings (1917); still regarded in mis-estimation of the Calligrammes (1918)—What then, of the Selenites building a sphere (1901), after Boullée’s Cénotaphe à Newton (1784), the opposing, perforated antiaircraft spotlights before the Allied bombing campaigns, from the Lichtdom (1933)—Intimates

Of administration; incredulous, as they read the editor of Fortune, Galbraith, his attorney, Ball’s seven-day interrogation of Albert Speer (Life, Dec. 17, 1945, 57)—Touching down on the single concrete runway of Switzerland, with Settembrinian epithets that Roentgen’s wife, also named Berthe, as the sitter for Auguste Clésinger’s Marianne (1878), whose silhouette of her hand screened, through what was then believed the fourth state of matter’s induction coil and evacuated Crookes tube, the bent band of X-ray emissions (22 December 1895)—The hour ferry from Cyprus

To Jaffa, Andromeda’s mainstay, and mention in the seven war books of Flavius Josephus (75 C.E.)—Intimations of Joseph Cornell’s Sand Fountain (1953) or the installation in the Guggenheim, Grand Hôtel de l'Observatoire (1954), in both the Aaltos’s Paimio sanatorium designed down to its washbasins—Blocks of sunshine and feathered lenticels of birch plywood chairs (1932), for hamstring pressure points and chest expansion—Waldhaus Flims in August, with its peaking meteors, to March, when it is not snowing, through each of its balconies, panels

Of Harvard's Donald Menzel’s constellation families, of Perseus (1973)—Seen in Verdi’s Isis in the Temple of Vulcan (1871), a seat of the liege made the incandescent filament at 2500 Celsius, and symbol (W) of tungsten—

The Hanseatentum of Hamburg, where Bruno, né Schlesinger, Walter conducts Aïda (27 September 1901), including Lübeck and beyond the Alster Basin; predecessor of the Charles—Out of which Thomas Mann; an isolated point of our curve, summoned one black among white swans, as they were in a dense flock on the mirror pool of Schlöss Benrath for his last novella (1953), then gathered in the mill dam besides right of way barges of the crackling tin of Erzgebirge separated from smelted wolf’s hair, tungsten—

On another shore, Cornish regulus and wolfram, its resistive wire down workable into the cord and contrail of the farthest unaided sight of the Swan’s tail, Deneb, through the ball of the question mark, the Lion’s heart, using first among seven stars of Ursa Minor as the cynosure—Training his manual shutter since age seven (1902), Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Captures the essence of childhood, which halts abruptly for the cause of having done nothing to deserve its patterns of a pricked paper stars—Backlit by permutations of Edison’s carbonized sewing thread, Swan’s cellulose (1881), Siemens and Halske’s patented tantalum (1905), until two Austrians, Alexander Just and Franz Hanaman (1904) sell up to General Electric (1907), if their newfound sobriety in the four corners of each room, the Braun SK55 Snow White’s Coffin (1956) spins tarpool LPs pending redesign for the disquiet of society meetings, which bring the wraith of the Coburg doll-manufacturer, and among those in whose endothelial networks tubercular bacilli lies sleeping, but for posttussive rales between Mariano Garau’s four-voice chorale of the ninety-sixth Psalm and the Mingus Quintet’s Reincarnation of a Lovebird (1957)—Hazarding the particulars of frame-panel

Wainscoting, there it is slightly stained by fireside deposits of lignite, with Henrietta’s thrown seven of hearts into the Schnier grate (1963); as perhaps it was before Heinrich Böll, the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1972) since 1929—Thomas Mann settled then, if not on the unslantingly dumbstruck vehicle of Arrhenius’s tallying beyond his Uppsala cathedral school, the formula of radiative forcing of carbon dioxide (1896), on the nothing before G-d, Der Bajazzo (1897)—Similarly at sea and in stature of Robert Frost’s A Record Stride (1912)

Hans vaults into the cast iron bath, where the Sepentery rings beaded from the failed faucet housing—Nevertheless, on the edge Marie reads aloud, recalling that gallery print of Figure III. of Lucas Jennis of Lambsprinck (1620), where the Shulamite's beloved is too intimate

Before fixed likenesses—A great and strong deer; / The other an unicorn [...] (3.4-5), or Song of Songs, a stag, domeh (2:9) and herself, a mare, dimmitik (1:9), by turns the date palm (7:9)—Adding teth (9) to each mem (40) to obtain twice forty-nine, Shoshan is the lily that secures the immortality of Neferkare Ramesses IX (1129–1111 B.C.E.), and possible origin of some of the forty-nine words absent from the indices, among them, being the steed of his ancestor's chariots (1:9), then the serpent and final punctum, and last of Dan to proceed with the fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) on the strait to Cyprus—

Derived from the Bruges strong-arm, the Van der Beurse, the Frankfurt Boerse sets upon equivalent exchange rates (1585); and along with resurgence of this fiend, Johann Spies prints the Faustbuch (1587)—Transcribed from the Nuremburg in postponement of Faber’s drafting leadholder (1861), for the flame of the bow, rishpe qeshet (Ps. 76:4), uncovered as the Canaanite Resheph syncretized at the Idalion as Apollo Amyklaios, and reported by the Swedish Cyprus

Expedition (1927)—Hofrat Behrens expands on a quarterly from the same year, the molecular weight and osmotic pressure of crystalline albumen constituting the ova and coagulating fibrin unruffled in the form of Brancusi’s heads, some taking his entire career to turn and patinate, to number Faber & Faber’s Lupercal (1960), as the eye-guarded eggs in these hedgerows—When the twins communicated to the hand through the sound of the seven-stringed kithara; the first fabricated by Hermes from a turtle shell, or as the application oxidizing with silver, Atget’s The Orangerie Staircase (1901), which had confronted Margotte in the consulting room—With then little thought to Georg Agricola’s lupi spuma (1556), Bergman’s heavy stone (1781), of which any traces of the metal; unlike all the plate packed on the ossatura of Cellini’s Perseus (1545), which will not weld, Juan José and Fausto D´Elhuyar y de Zubice first isolated from Scheele’s sulfur-colored, hydrated tungsten

Trioxide with charcoal (1783)—Youths that once ran up the avenue with goatskin thongs, and stopping before nearly a score of riderless Barbary horses raced the Via del Corso for Carnevale until 1882, in another city meet as intimates

Seated with crossed legs in Thonet's No. 14 six pieces of steam-bent wood chairs (1859)—With his motions to catch his subjects in midair; there is the unrivaled subtlety in Lartigue—

Among the Davos attendees is Robert Louis Stevenson, at Steigenberger Grandhotel Belvédère, [February 1881], who is passed the copy that would become Horatio Forbes Brown’s Life on the Lagoons (1884)—Replicated inside the Swiss hotels; there were those outfitting the sooted façades of Dordrecht, Strasbourg, Eppendorf in Jugendstil, and here, an entire pavilion, in otherwise klassisch-feudal accommodations, with locking door panels

Of stem and glass, and felted, as to not clatter at the intersection of the Bise and the Föhn in prominences of drafts, where piz is misheard as pieces, among other mapped horns and needles—In the wake of the Attilan invasions of Rome (452 C.E.), the Venetian lagoon of the Visigoths is chronicled by Joseph Aschbach (1827); Ruskin familiarized the reader Proust; The Wings of the Lion (1865) and why a preponderance of female nudes of Venice never [...] exercising any overpowering influence, by the Venetians, the last believing school (1855), on his pilgrimage to Évian (1899); the author of Sesame and Lilies in the same voice addressed to Lacerta, Marie La Touche, his pupil's benevolent reader—Himself, brought to the mature Carpaccio of the Scuola, St. George Baptizing the Selenites (1507), a decade from the opinion of Burne-Jones (1859)—Then, what of the questioning silence, which seems to cover a reservation at the unfinished Perseus cycle, though most distinguished is The Baleful Head (1887), in whose octagonal font is, to the VSEPR indoctrinated, the arrangement of tungsten carbide, with nickel for sheen, shaped into a dense band—More likely, the cleavage of each hand that wears it, by the couple loath to unclasp reflections of themselves—Caput Algol, to the astrologer's son and fifth procurator of Judea, incorporates itself; the beheading of Herod’s second, remains apocryphal, as in the ensnared Pythian mane of the lawn's plaster Apollo Belvedere, where the stride

Of Pegasus sits square between bows and courbettes—On the waxing Moon of February, highlighting Cancer, the 12th of Adar I 5776, where strides

About the Caumasee and its footbridge's overlaid rockslides are turning up here and there preserved scales to tempt the next Agassiz—Professor Persikov, from The Fatal Eggs (1928), supplying the notion of the Nehushtan multiplied everywhere, along the trodden diagonal between law and mercy exposed by Rodchenko’s Asphalting a Street in Moscow (1929)—Calling to mind the unregistered Danites; equally the lot of Artur Sammler, who considered the martial sendoff from a village in Piaseczno his first achievement—The mugshot of the Apollo XVII Mission (1972), whose Vatican copy from Leocharnes, the 4th century contemporary of the Callippus, posits for all time, as well as any astronomer, another seven junctions for the seeming retrograde actions of crossing bodies suspended above the Earth—At Kition, Cyprus,

Before the destruction by a quake (322 C.E.) fetched down the bulk of cyclopean fortifications built with blended labor, as on the mortuary complex of Ramses III (1198-1116 B.C.E.) at Medinet Habu on the West Bank of Luxor, the snake tubes and dog burials; from each guardian taking in its own indiscernible course, attest to the healing center there—How the explicitly defended against divided waters and aethyr resolve in our collective mind consisting of over six hundred gestures of Arrival and Departure—Integrating the Mauritian namesake of the adjacent ski colony, with Verdi; more Greek than Italian, from the Magna Graecia levied under the Hapsburgs, to a Radames leading the campaign into Ethiopia, where the solar barque once set up the Blue Nile protected by the Two Ladies of Upper and Lower Egypt, the vulture and cobra, enumerated in panels

Distilling the name in motionless amnion; later, furnishing the key to the inscriptions—Being far too disintegrated to question the man who had thrown himself down a flight of stairs, Margotte had anticipated the meeting, when Primo Levi’s Il Sistema Periodico (1975) earlier on, found its way into her hands, as did Uncle Tungsten (2001)

What had amounted to a cambric of girlhood shams, the Fascist spirit and subsequent antagonism beyond the printed page, Arkin rediscovered through intimate

Disputation, which is the highest expression of marital harmony, and each session achieving a new stand of the oaks of Bashan, its founders withstood analysis—Accounting before the first examination of the human brain (1663), before future imaging collapsed metabolism, light, with the saltation of human thought, of T.C. Greco, the surgeon and painter’s amanuensis, as with Tulp the anatomist (1632), who found the peau d’orange of the left breast of Hendrickje Stoffels (1967), by which Rembrandt exposed the seventh daughter, his Mistress, Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654)—Margotte conceded the fashion photographer with 130 extant albums of the momentous family as a promising explanation for Lartigue’s

Poignancy, beyond white marking pencil and negatives, as drawing by the camera lucida—Besides Lartigue,

Partiality for Brassaï’s 1934 edition of Minotaure, for Barthes (1985), the background exists fully; elsewhere, Zissou’s flying technologies, for which the stride

Pathé camera is again readied—For Taurus skewering the asterism represented by Erichthonius, sire of Tyche; Arkin, back in bed, flustered by this zoophilic talk and the six-hundred-year-old ark-maker disposition in collecting—Hesitant between Pausanias (150 C.E.), the recitative horse, Arion, conceived by Demeter in Fury semblance coupling with Poseidon (VIII.25) or the seventh-century Arion Herodotus (I.23) indicated, originator of the dithyramb, flung off the boat, then straddling a dolphin to Taenarum near Corinth onward to Tarentum at Apulia with the Parthenians—Near Cetus, whose lower wave front is sketched by Deneb Kaitos, at the celestial equator, Charybdis at the Strait of Messina that gyrates into triskelion, or Algol and Ceres at the same degree, transiting Pisces—The Two Sicilies's Piazzi, who secured the flying star of 61 Cygni (1792); for a second time, at the cappodanno of 1801, the asteroid (2016)—After an intimate

Dinner and walk to reflect on the day’s separate itineraries—Saving for daybreak the just-released Apollo X feedback; sometime, in future, an investigation of the Kalonymos of Hinterrhein, or Lucca, of the ramparts, cordons, and parapets of the site of the first triumvirate (56 B.C.E.) mortared as a mural crown—The reductive photograph falls away to Hofmannsthal’s Experience (1897), His city, at night in dark-blue water (line 23)—Cyprus

Of the hundred mouths / of a foreign river / fertilize without rain ! (407-9)—Song of Songs’s beautiful dove (1:15) is Jonah; while somewhere's delivery by an international Times, per formative identity, 79 Via Settembrini, Museo MADRE, Joseph Beuys is stepping off the gallery panel (1971)—

Galleria Lia Rumma’s Gilberto Zorio exhibition showcases a force-feeding apparatus spraying phosphorus, Siviera e marrano (2013); that word, for a pigskin, and one with an aluminum star on a palimpsest, Pergamena di luce (2015)—Pronouncing on the viewer with its captioned side-by-side prints, the way a sharply swept lawn looks almost blue in moonlight, and tilting the inner scales of Dan for the difference in the space’s tungsten

Salted gold bars—Borne neither by feint nor flayed ceremony, Margotte struggled that night as one of two bears at their circumpolar bindings; the undreamed-of tungsten heft of that memoriam—James Merrill, as if pulling back from Lartigue’s

Sporting life, confides An Upward Look (1996) containing an exchange between two intimates, remaining as the green line of Cyprus—Oh heart green acre       sown with salt / by the departing occupier—

Striding from Brocken; they go together, back to the earthlights, to untimely skin back the inflamed panels of Herculaneum, but then, what porters to anticipate their port of call—